


the one who watches

by satellitescales



Series: Tales from the Corporate Wars [1]
Category: Borderlands (Video Games)
Genre: Canon Backstory, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Pre-Canon, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-14 15:08:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29669118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satellitescales/pseuds/satellitescales
Summary: Tantalus is a planet of extremes, Atlas invades another planet, and Alma Harren gets a business offer from a strange man.Origin story of Hyperion
Series: Tales from the Corporate Wars [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2180199
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	the one who watches

**Author's Note:**

> am i qualified to be designing planets? no. will that stop me? no!

Tantalus is a planet of extremes.

Megacities of limitless potential crawl across the polar continents. Frigid hubs of industry and culture; wealth and innovation. Spires of glass and populations in the billions—all protected from the storms blasting along the equator. If you’ve got enough money, you live on one of the poles in a heated condo with a view. Skiing on the weekends, a cushy corporate job up in a skyscraper of glass, seal and striped bullymong cooked in fat and drizzled in lemon, caviar, crystal chandeliers, fur coats out of absurdly endangered animals—the high life.

But if you don’t happen to have a hundred thousand in pocket change, you’re stuck waiting out storm season underground and spending the rest of the 527-day year on the surface cleaning up the resulting mess.

Alma Harren is aboveground to clean up a different type of mess.

Fortysomething, deaf in one ear, orphaned and widowed and childless. Barely anything to her name but an arthritic cat and a scrapyard sniper rifle. Keeping her hometown, Shua’awm, safe is all she can do anymore. Not that she has a choice, not with Atlas.

Tantalus is a planet of extremes. Atlas’ arrival stuck to this paradigm.

They dropped in one afternoon—an entire fleet of soldiers and miners and everyone else. Declared they were searching for alien artifacts, and since Tantalus’ equator isn’t recognized as an inhabited territory by the Central Government, they were free to do what they pleased. Corporate bastards made it clear on day one that they’d be taking what they needed, no matter the cost. They bulldozed entire villages to start mining. Machinery so massive and heavy it rolls right over the ramshackle huts, chews up trees, grinds boulders to dust. What little the storms left behind, Atlas has made it their mission to destroy.

It’s a daily battle to keep them out of Shua’awm—a fight the town is slowly losing.

Alma perches on rock faces, hides in piles of rubble, camouflages herself using the hostile landscape that birthed and raised her. All she has is her sniper rifle, but Tantalus is her stomping grounds. Atlas is just an invasive species.

Sometimes it feels like it’s just her up against all of them. A few of her neighbors sold their property to Atlas for a one-way ticket to Promethea. Alma found them dumped in the well, a bullet each, execution-style. All Alma could think as she stood there and stared at them, all red and black and chewed up by flies, was that their brains were leaking into the groundwater, and whether or not that would spoil it. Then again, it’s brain-water or dying of thirst. If Atlas doesn’t get her first.

Alma drags the front door closed. The above-ground portion of her home is a rickety patchwork of sheet metal and rotted wood, decorated sparsely with secondhand furniture. The old water-swollen door screeches against the scuffed floorboards. She kicks it to get it shut and sighs, leaning her head on the wood. Her feet are blistered, her clothes stink of sweat and dead skin and dirt, and the weight of her rifle is digging into her shoulder.

Tomorrow will be another day of the same.

She slides the deadbolt into place and hangs her rifle by the door. The chewed leather strap settles onto the worn hook with a creak. Floorboards sink under her weight. This whole place is about to fall apart.

When she turns around, she finds a man sitting on the moldy couch across from her. Still as a statue, dressed in a ludicrously expensive, spotless suit. Hair slicked to the sides of his head. Eyes like the dead—distant and fixed and hard. Those eyes dredge up an old memory of her father. Folktales of the monsters who live in the storms.

Alma wrestles the knife from her boot. She points it at the man. He just smiles. Smiles with too many straight, alabaster teeth. He looks like the kind of man animals would turn and run from. Speaking of which . . . Alma’s eyes dart to the basement trapdoor, where her cat is. It’s untouched.

“Who are you?” Alma demands. He smiles wider, somehow.

“I’ve come to offer you the opportunity of a lifetime.”

“In my house.”

“That is where we are, is it not?”

“Hm. Keep talking.”

His smile drops to something more human. “You’ve made quite the name for yourself, killing Atlas soldiers left and right. Rumor says you’re the best sharpshooter on the planet—perhaps the galaxy.”

“They’re not wrong.”

“So I’ve seen.” He’s been watching her. For how long? And how had she not noticed? “Who are you?” He leans back on the couch, which makes a wet sound. “Mercenary? Dahl? Exile?”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

He stares at her. Alma returns it.

“Fine, fine.” The man spreads his hands, fully at ease. “I am Maxim Turner, and I am here to pitch you my idea for the company that will end the Corporate War once and for all. A company to rise against Atlas, send Dahl to its knees, and silence squabbling Vladof. The Central Government is already on its last, feeble, necrotic oligarchical legs. A new age is coming.”

“You promise a great deal,” Alma says. So he isn’t Atlas. She allows herself a smidge of respite and shrugs off her coat.

“I make no promises,” He says, almost angrily. “Promises are breakable. What I tell you is the future, if, that is, you choose to join me.”

“I don’t even know you.”

He gives her a look that suggests reminds Alma he’s been observing her. “Don’t you want more than this, Harren?” His mouth twists around her name in a way that makes her ears ring. Turner gestures to her meager shack and, as if on cue, a gust rattles the roof, bringing inside the stench of ozone. “You know weapons. Wouldn’t you like to apply that somewhere other than the front lines? Your survival isn’t even a guarantee here, and, as much as it pains me to say, this continent is already under Atlas’ thumb.

“But the planet has not yet fallen. If you work with me, we can take it back. Tantalus will be the beginning.”

Tantalus is a planet of extremes. Either it will have her or . . .

Or she will have it.

Turner’s eyes shine like he can hear her thoughts. “I have all the necessary parts but you.”

Alma meanders to the kitchenette, turning his words over in her head. She pours herself a glass of dubious tap water. Tastes like rust and something mawkish. Alma remembers the bodies in the well. “If I go with you, I won’t be here,” She says, wiping her mouth.

“I figured you’d be worried about that.” Turner smiles like they are old friends. “I won’t tear you from your hometown. You can continue fighting your one-woman war—you’re rather good at it anyhow—but when you aren’t busy putting one in Atlas skulls, you will be helping me and my business partner to build this company. It will take work, but nothing too time-consuming as to encroach on your current . . . endeavors.

“You will be generously compensated. You could repair your home, get a better gun—though it will have to be Hyperion-made, of course.”

“Hyperion . . . What is that?”

“Ah, I am trying not to get too ahead of myself, but this is rather exciting. It’s the name I chose.  _ Hyperion _ . ‘The one who watches.’ How does that sound?”

“It sounds,” Alma says slowly, “like you have a third business partner.”


End file.
